illumin8 combines scientific content from Elsevier and other publishers, Web and patent content with intelligent Web search technology to address complex technology and market landscape questions faster and more easily

Amsterdam - Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of scientific, medical and technical products and services, today announced the European availability of illumin8, a unique Web-based natural language processing solution designed to help corporate research professionals answer complex R&D questions with greater speed and effectiveness. illumin8 extracts key relationships across the breadth of Elsevier’s premium scientific content, millions of patents and 8 billion Web pages and fuses them into an organized view, making it the richest business search solution in the world.

Recent research¹ projects European R&D spending to reach $280.2 billion in 2009, accounting for roughly a quarter of the World’s total R&D expenditures. Initially launched in the United States in February of 2008, illumin8 fills the void of streamlined, efficient research processes, setting a new standard for data extraction from high-quality content sources.

Traditional research tools are unable to uncover hidden insights because the user needs to know exactly what to look for, and the results are generated in the form of document sets that require significant effort - taking days or weeks to organize and form meaning or understanding. illumin8 is more efficient and delivers far superior results because it is driven by a powerful semantic search index that surfaces exactly what the user is looking for in great detail, eliminating false positives and redundant results. This provides a much more effective result set and highly intuitive user experience that accelerates the discovery process. illumin8 searches across a wide range of technical and subject domains, serving the needs of research professionals in a number of different fields such as automotive, oil & gas, electronics, chemicals, coatings and consumer goods and packaging.

Upon evaluating the product, Outsell, Inc., a leading research and advisory firm focused on the publishing, information, and education industries, noted, “The ability to deliver answers rather than documents strikes at the heart of the information need of the R&D knowledge worker. Indeed, in Outsell’s view, the importance of illumin8, both as a product for Elsevier, and as an example of the direction in which ‘search’ is heading, is hard to overstate.”

How illumin8 Works
illlumin8 optimizes Technology Intelligence and discovery practices, enabling users to quickly comprehend key elements of a technology to efficiently deliver on key strategic initiatives. Because of its unique algorithms, illumin8 is designed to go beyond simple keyword search and is the only tool that can extract relationships from vast amounts of information, thereby providing the quickest and easiest way to understand technology and remove roadblocks in the scientists’ workflow. It does so by reading and distilling data for actionable insight, such as accelerating product development innovation, identifying new technologies and finding potential partners/collaborators. Further, illumin8 guides research at the front-end of innovation by uncovering undisclosed concepts, finding new technologies and identifying the leading experts and innovators in new areas

“Companies are always on the hunt for the ’next big thing,’ so having tools that help to overcome scientific roadblocks and reach this point of innovative breakthrough at an accelerated rate can prove to be valuable in slashing time-to-market for new products and services. This is a fact that holds true for a number of industries - from food and consumer packaged goods, to chemicals, automotive, or oil & gas,” said Martin O’Malley, managing director, Corporate Markets for Elsevier. “By bringing illumin8 to our European corporate audience, we’re aiming to contribute to a more streamlined R&D process and allow corporate researchers, scientists, information and innovation professionals to embrace the evolving importance of international collaboration.”

illumin8 is part of Elsevier’s portfolio of advanced information retrieval solutions that transforms its high value content into actionable knowledge to improve ROI for corporate R&D. illumin8 users can easily access the full-text of Elsevier journals if they have an online subscription to the journal through ScienceDirect, the world’s largest online platform of science, technical and medical (STM) content.

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as Science Direct, MDConsult, Scopus, bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier’s ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).